The History of the Quantitative Methods in Finance Conference Series. 1992-2007

This report charts the history of the Quantitative Methods in Finance (QMF) conference from its beginning in 1993 to the 15th conference in 2007. It lists alphabetically the 1037 speakers who presented at all 15 conferences and the titles of their papers.

Alternative framework for the fair valuation of participating life insurance contracts

In this communication, we develop suitable valuation techniques for a with-profit/unitized with profit life insurance policy providing interest rate guarantees, when a jump-diffusion process for the evolution of the underlying reference portfolio is used. Particular attention is given to the mispricing generated by the misspecification of a jumpdiffusion process for the underlying asset as a pure diffusion process, and to which extent this mispricing affects the profitability and the solvency of the life insurance company issuing these contracts

Contributions to risk-sensitive asset management

Imperial Users onl

Macroeconomic Volatility and Sovereign Asset-Liability Management

For most developing countries, the predominant source of sovereign wealth is commodity related export income. However, over-reliance on commodity related income exposes countries to significant terms of trade shocks due to excessive price volatility. The spillovers are pro-cyclical fiscal policies and macroeconomic volatility problems that if not adequately managed, could have catastrophic economic consequences including sovereign bankruptcy. The aim of this study is to explore new ways of solving the problem in an asset-liability management framework for an exporting country like Ghana. Firstly, I develop an unconditional commodity investment strategy in the tactical mean-variance setting for deterministic returns. Secondly, in continuous time, shocks to return moments induce additional hedging demands warranting an extension of the analysis to a dynamic stochastic setting whereby, the optimal commodity investment and fiscal consumption policies are conditioned on the stochastic realisations of commodity prices. Thirdly, I incorporate jumps and stochastic volatility in an incomplete market extension of the conditional model. Finally, I account for partial autocorrelation, significant heteroskedastic disturbances, cointegration and non-linear dependence in the sample data by adopting GARCH-Error Correction and dynamic Copula-GARCH models to enhance the forecasting accuracy of the optimal hedge ratios used for the state-contingent dynamic overlay hedging strategies that guarantee Pareto efficient allocation. The unconditional model increases the Sharpe ratio by a significant margin and noticeably improves the portfolio value-at-risk and maximum drawdown. Meanwhile, the optimal commodities investment decisions are superior in in-sample performance and robust to extreme interest rate changes by up to 10 times the current rate. In the dynamic setting, I show that momentum strategies are outperformed by contrarian policies, fiscal consumption must account for less than 40% of sovereign wealth, while risky investments must not exceed 50% of the residual wealth. Moreover, hedging costs are reduced by as much as 55% while numerically generating state-dependent dynamic futures hedging policies that reveal a predominant portfolio strategy analogous to the unconditional model. The results suggest buying commodity futures contracts when the country’s current exposure in a particular asset is less than the model implied optimal quantity and selling futures contracts when the actual quantity exported exceeds the benchmark.Open Acces

Mathematical models for optimal management of bank capital, reserves and liquidity

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThe aim of this study is to construct and propose continuous-time mathematical models for optimal management of bank capital, reserves and liquidity. This aim emanates from the global financial crisis of 2007 − 2009. In this regard and as a first task, our objective is to determine an optimal investment strategy for a commercial bank subject to capital requirements as prescribed by the Basel III Accord. In particular, the objective of the aforementioned problem is to maximize the expected return on the bank capital portfolio and minimize the variance of the terminal wealth. We apply classical tools from stochastic analysis to achieve the optimal strategy of a benchmark portfolio selection problem which minimizes the expected quadratic distance of the terminal risk capital reserves from a predefined benchmark. Secondly, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) introduced strategies to protect banks from running out of liquidity. These measures included an increase of the minimum reserves that the bank ought to hold, in response to the global financial crisis. We propose a model to minimize risk for a bank by finding an appropriate mix of diversification, balanced against return on the portfolio. Thirdly and finally, in response to the financial crises, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) designed a set of precautionary measures (known as Basel III) for liquidity imposed on banks and one of its purposes is to protect the economy from deteriorating. Recently, bank regulators wanted banks to depend on sources such as core deposits and long-term funding from small businesses and less on short-term wholesale funding

Empirical studies in corporate credit modelling; liquidity premia, factor portfolios & model uncertainty

Insurers match the cash flows of typically illiquid insurance liabilities, such as in-force annuities, with government and corporate bonds. As they intend to buy corporate bonds and hold them to maturity, they can capture the value attached to liquidity, without running the market liquidity risk that is associated with having to sell bonds in the open market. During the long consultation period dedicated to the mark-to-market valuation of insurance assets and liabilities for the Solvency II regulatory framework, CEIOPS noted the importance of the accurate breakdown of the credit spread into its components, most notably the credit and non-credit (i.e. liquidity) components. In this thesis we review many modelling efforts to isolate the liquidity premium and propose a reduced-form modelling approach that relies on a new, relative liquidity proxy. Challenging the status quo when it comes to active and passive investment strategies, products and funds, Exchange Traded Funds and `smart-beta' products provide investors with straightforward ways to strategically expose a portfolio to risk drivers, raising the bar for traditional investment funds and managers. In this thesis, we investigate how traditional sources of equity outperformance (alpha), such as small caps, low volatility and value, translate to UK corporate bonds. For automated trading strategies in corporate bonds, and those with specific factor exposure requirements in particular, transaction costs, rebalancing and an optimal turnover strategy are crucial; these aspects of building factor portfolios are explored for the UK market. Since the financial crisis, mathematical models used in finance have been subject to a fair amount of criticism. More than ever has this highlighted the need of better risk management of financial models themselves, leading to a surge in `model validation' roles in industry and an increased scrutiny from regulatory bodies. In this thesis we look at stochastic credit models that are commonly used by insurers to project forward credit-risky bond portfolios and the model uncertainty and parameter risk that arises as a result of relying on published credit migration matrices. Specifically, our investigation focuses on two violations of the Markovian process that credit transitions are assumed to follow and statistical uncertainty of the migration matrix